Hospital missions and the education of our future health care workforce

Today's U.S. health care industry is facing unprecedented shortages of health personnel in a great variety of disciplines and locations. An adequate supply of well-educated and trained health professionals is imperative to ensure sufficient access to health care for our citizenry. Hospital mission statements reflect the character, strategic direction, and priorities of the organization; thus, we might expect these statements to address the position and strategy of the organizations in regard to education of future health professionals. To investigate hospitals' publicly stated attention and commitment to the education of health professionals, we analyzed publicly available mission statements from a random stratified sample of 402 hospitals. The hospitals were stratified on the basis of teaching status, rural or urban, and profit status. The percentage of hospitals mentioning an education-related keyword was estimated using a 95% confidence interval with a finite population correction factor on the proportion within each stratum. As expected, teaching hospitals were significantly more likely to include language about education in their mission statements than nonteaching hospitals, with 74% of teaching hospitals mentioning education at least once. We found no significant difference in the use of education language among the mission statements of nonteaching hospitals, where 20% mentioned education at least once. From these findings, we conclude that despite the key importance of health professionals, strategies and policy regarding the education of future health personnel have not yet become "mission level" in importance to hospitals.